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runsforcelery
First Space Lord
Posts: 2425
Joined: Sun Aug 09, 2009 11:39 am
Location: South Carolina
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I haven’t previously gotten involved in the debate over whether or not Elizabeth should trust the Republic of Haven and of whether or not the Republic of Haven is worthy of her trust for a lot of reasons, including the fact that as the author I have control of what the various actors do. That means I can “demonstrate” whatever I want to demonstrate, which gives me what I suppose some people would consider an unfair advantage.
However, I’d like to point out a couple of things about Eloise Pritchart and the post-Saint-Just Republic of Haven.
(1) The current government/constitution of Haven was restored after years of warfare against the Star Kingdom and after several years of very bloody civil war against StateSec warlords. That tends to shape the way the citizens of the Republic regard the value of that constitution and that form of government. Moreover, I should also point out that the “StateSec warlords” in question were also the champions of the Committee of Public Safety and therefore were integrally tied in fact (and in the minds of the voting public) to Pierre and his regime. The majority of people who would have supported Pierre initially had already disappeared into the dustbin of history; the ones who were left after his own death and Thomas Theisman’s coup have been either eradicated/thoroughly discredited in the post-coup civil war.
(2) The folks who want to go back to the “good old days” of the Legislaturalists constitute a distinct (and relatively small) minority. The primary justifications for going back to the “good old days” would have been either (a) “the system worked better then” or (b) “we were respected then” because of the People’s Republic’s size and military power The problem for those longing for a return to the glory days of the People’s Republic of Haven is that the system is working better now than it ever did then and that the Republic of Haven, while territorially smaller than at the peak of the People’s Republic of Haven, is still far larger than it was during its pre-conquest period and the RHN is one of the two largest and most powerful navies in the galaxy and is allied to the other one of the two largest and most powerful navies in the galaxy.
(3) In regard to whether or not the restored Republic under Eloise Pritchart was acting “honorably” before the resumption of hostilities and in the decision to resume hostilities itself, I would make the following points.
(a) The restored Republic had committed to allowing any star system which wished to leave the Republic to do so, and had in fact honored that pledge. They weren’t just talking the talk in this case, they were actually walking the walk, and they’d demonstrated that they were.
(b) The Pritchart Administration had been negotiating in complete good faith in its attempts to secure an actual formal treaty of peace which would officially end hostilities. As far as Pritchart was concerned, the only really “core terms” were the status of the populated once-Havenite star systems still occupied by the Manticoran Alliance. In effect, she was insisting that those populations be allowed to choose their own futures, just as she had allowed the systems which wanted to leave the Republic to do so. This happened to be something that was a serious matter of principle for both her and Thomas Theisman.
(c) Eloise and her analysts were aware of the fact that the High Ridge Government was using the continued state of war as a cynical domestic political ploy, and there seemed little possibility of an impending change of government in the Star Kingdom. In other words, even before Giancola started playing with the diplomatic correspondence, they were aware that they were dealing with a dishonest man who could have cared less about anything resembling a principle and whose word could not be trusted.
(d) Although Eloise was aware that Shannon Foraker and Bolthole were producing an entirely new fleet which was much closer to the Royal Manticoran Navy in combat capability, she was also aware through most of the negotiating period that Manticore possessed the technological upper hand and that the completion of ships already under construction at places like Grendelsbane could quickly counterbalance much of the numerical superiority the RHN was building up at Bolthole. In other words, whatever High Ridge and Janacek had done to the Navy, the RMN remained a technologically superior threat with the capacity to rebound rapidly from its numerical inferiority once it realized that inferiority existed.
(e) There was no peace treaty. The two star nations were still legally in a state of war, which meant that either side was fully justified in resuming hostilities in the absence of genuine efforts to secure that final peace treaty.
(f) Manticore was falsifying the diplomatic correspondence. The fact that the person who was actually falsifying the correspondence was her own Secretary of State was unknown to her (or to anyone else except for a total of three men out of the entire population of the Republic of Haven), and the falsification itself was fully in character for the dishonest negotiator on the other side of the table from her.
(g) Thomas Theisman had been careful to conceal the creation of Haven’s own fleet of SD(P)s primarily because he’d feared — probably with damned good cause — that if Manticore had guessed for a moment what he was building up in secrecy, it would have launched a new, immediate offensive to crush the new government and the restored constitution before he could put enough of them into commission to dissuade them. When Haven revealed the existence of its own pod-layers, it was as a pointed suggestion that the Republic was no longer defenseless against a Manticoran resumption of military operations and that Manticore no longer had a monopoly on the type if Haven resume military operations. In other words, the Republic was putting its military cards more or less completely on the table in an effort to persuade Manticore that the SKM could no longer take its military supremacy for granted and had better negotiate in good faith. High Ridge still refused to do anything of the sort, and Janacek himself suggested to High Ridge the possibility of a “Copenhagen” solution to the problem by launching a surprise Manticoran attack.
(h) Given the years-long effort to negotiate a treaty, given High Ridge’s obvious dishonesty and duplicity, given the continued occupation of inhabited Havenite star systems by Manticore, given the “escalation” of High Ridge’s dishonesty and duplicity in the falsified correspondence (which everyone in the Pritchart Administration [aside from Giancola] “knew” had been done by the Manties, and given the fact that Manticore and Haven were still at war with one another by Manticore’s choice, it’s difficult (for me, at any rate) to see Pritchart’s decision to resume active hostilities as a dishonorable or illegitimate act.
(4) Pritchart’s war aims were extremely limited. Had she wanted to, she and Theisman could have launched Operation Thunderbolt directly against the Manticore Binary System. With the same degree of strategic/tactical surprise, and with all of their SD(P) strength concentrated in a single force, it’s highly likely that they would have succeeded — at the very least — of effectively gutting the RMN’s primary fleet strength. The consequences, especially if they’d diverted just enough force to take out Grendelsbane at the same time, would have been far more devastating than the attacks she actually launched. Her goal was to inflict enough damage on the Star Kingdom two force it to sit down at the table and negotiate seriously. Trevor’s Star was intended to be her primary card in those negotiations, but she never had any intention of attacking the home system until Apollo was revealed.
(5) Operation Beatrice, leading to the Battle of Manticore, was a last ditch option she never wanted to pursue in the first place. Beatrice was launched only after Manticore had resumed military operations after breaking off the comprehensive negotiations Pritchart had proposed and Elizabeth had accepted, and it wouldn’t have been launched even then if the RMN hadn’t demonstrated the existence and potential of Apollo. However they’d gotten to that point, the only real options available to Eloise at that time were to surrender or to launch Beatrice in hopes that Apollo was in sufficiently limited deployment that Haven could secure a victory before Manticore was in a position to devastate or conquer the Haven System itself. She’d done her damnedest to create new peace talks, only to have Manticore walk away from them. The domestic political situation — and the domestic Havenite perception of the war — meant that she couldn’t unilaterally lay down her sword without revealing the truth about Giancola and she had no proof of that truth. (EDIT: I should also add here that without that proof, she couldn’t go public — at least until Victor and Anton came back with evidence that the MA had been behind it [even though the MA hadn’t been behind it ] — lest she be accused of following in the footsteps of the rulers of the PRH and disappearing political enemies, then accusing them of heinous crimes when they were no longer around to dispute the charges. Had she been perceived as doing that, it would have gutted the entire effort to restore the old Republic because the supposed “restorers” would have been revealed as just as bad as any of their predecesors. She’d dedicated her life to restoring political accountability and the rule of law. If she was seen as simply using those principles in her own quest for power, the Republic’s citizens would have had no reason to trust the integrity of any institution she'd set up/restored and any corrupt successor or would-be successor would have been held to a far lower standard.) The entire rationale for the proposal of fresh peace talks was that the parties were in a sufficiently balanced state of parity that negotiations would be between two equals, and she fully intended to offer the most generous terms possible. That had been snatched away from her when it had literally been within her grasp; Manticore had resumed active operations; and Apollo once again had given Manticore what amounted to tactical supremacy. Perhaps she should have accepted defeat and surrendered, but if she’d done so, the consequences might well have been fatal for the Republic’s restoration. She had to make the call one way or the other, and she chose against the high probability of losing everything she, Theisman, and the other reformers had fought for years to accomplish. And I might point out that her fear of losing that had less to do with a sense of personal loss than it did with her awareness of what it would mean for the Republic of Haven if it fell back into the hands of another Rob Pierre or Oscar Saint-Just, or a new version of the Legislaturalists.
(6) The odds of a revanchist Haven seeking “revenge” against Manticore are not nonexistent but very, very slim. Manticore and the People’s Republic of Haven were open adversaries for decades — as Honor pointed out in Mission of Honor, effectively for her entire adult lifetime. Manticore, however, was always seen as an honorable adversary by the vast majority of the Havenite military, despite Cordelia Ransom’s propaganda. The High Ridge Government squandered some of that perception, but Havenite military personnel had entirely too much experience with corrupt political regimes of their own to hang that one around the neck of the RMN. While wartime military casualties had been severe, the losses inflicted by Manticore were far, far smaller than the military and civilian losses inflicted by the Committee of Public Safety, and even before the Committee of Public Safety came along, the Legislaturalists had imprisoned and “disappeared” far larger numbers of Havenite citizens than Manticore ever killed or captured. The fact that following the Battle of Manticore and all of the casualties both sides had suffered, at a time when Manticore clearly had the power to impose whatever military terms it pleased, Queen Elizabeth chose to resume negotiations and to offer extraordinarily generous terms, went a long way towards defusing hostility towards Manticore which might have lingered from both wars against the SKM. And the evidence that the Mesan Alignment was manipulating both star nations with the intention that they should destroy each other has gone an enormous way towards transforming the relationship between them. It’s not just a case of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” but of “my enemy is also my friend’s enemy and wants both of us dead.” The fact that the RHN was able to “ride to the rescue” of the Star Kingdom (their honorable enemies) against the threat of the most powerful star nation in the history of mankind and ,with the RMN and GSN, win the greatest, most one-sided naval victory in galactic history creates a powerful narrative in favor of maintaining good relations with Manticore. And the fact that both Elizabeth and Eloise are going to be doing everything they possibly can at least for the remainder of Eloise’s current presidency (and I strongly suspect she would have an excellent chance of winning reelection after her current term) to encourage economic and military cooperation and integration between the Star Empire and the Republic of Haven, assisted by the ongoing threat of the Mesan Alignment’s existence, should do a pretty fair job over the next 10 to 20 years of undoing any lingering hostility between the two star nations.
Anyway, those of the points I wanted to offer for analysis.
Have fun.
Last edited by runsforcelery on Wed Jun 25, 2014 10:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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